Deborah Tannen's Essay 'Conversational Styles'

Summary Critique Essay Assignment In Deborah Tannen’s essay “Conversational Styles” she explains why small group work should be in every classroom setting. She also explains the way men and woman use different languages. Tannen’s questionable assumption is that men and woman speak different in the classroom, fails to define participation, and fails to discuss the downside of working in small groups.

“Conversational Styles” by Deborah Tannen is about the importance of working a group setting. Tannen explains the difference between how boys and girls talk when they are children. Boys talked more about sports, insults, and making fun of other children. While girls talk to their one or two closest friends which were girls as well. Then Tannen

Tannen talks about participation in the classroom with men and woman. She says how many men like to participate in class while many woman don’t speak and count how many times participate. Tannen decided to do a classroom experiment with the men and woman she taught. She divided her class into small groups which could be based on ethnicity, gender, and how often they spoke in class. During this experiment she noticed that most of the men and woman participated a little more. She asked her student if they liked small groups more than group discussion which no one said it bothered them. Tannen believes that all of the classrooms should have the small group interaction. First off, Tannen makes questionable assumptions about how men and women speak in the classroom setting. Tannen says “It is simply that a greater percentage of discussion time is taken by men’s voice.”(pg. 315) While Tannen says this I question how she got to this conclusion without any sorts of evidence and it

Tannen explains how the small group technic worked for her however she doesn’t have any evidence besides her own to prove it. There are many possibilities why it does work for her such as her teaching style, students willing to work with others, and subject that is being taught. She states that “Everyone in the class found the small groups interesting, and no one indicated he or she would have preferred that the class not break into groups.”(pg. 319) I do agree that small groups would be interesting, however who would go up to their professor and say I don’t like the small groups? The downsides of small groups from my experience is only one or two people actually do the work while the other’s talk about something else or people get off topic very easily which causes them not to do the work at all. Another downside is people possibly don’t understand what they are supposed to do so the group can’t talk about it or do their work because they people may not want to talk to their professor because then they will know that weren’t paying attention when they were given